JIM HEGAN

By Marshall Adesman

Stats from www.baseball-reference.com

I work with a fellow from Ohio who loves all of Cleveland's sports teams. Whatever the season, he keeps me filled in on what's happening on the playing fields on the shore of Lake Erie. I don't care all that much, really, but I listen respectfully because he so obviously relishes talking about it. And he's very knowledgeable about his teams, I must admit that. But I am older than he is, so when I mention, for instance, Cleveland Indian players of the past, he sometimes doesn't know their names, especially if they played before the 1970s. 

I once mentioned the name of Jim Hegan and got a blank stare. Now, he often references the fact that the Tribe hasn't won a World Series since 1948, so I thought that, at the very least, that championship roster would be engraved in the minds of every loyal Indians' booster. Guess not. Of course, Hegan wasn't your prototypical major league player, even in an era that pre-dates the phrase "tape-measure home run." Even back then you don't really expect someone with a lifetime batting average of .228 to have played in over 1600 major league games; weak sticks generally don't get a chance to hang around all that long. So how do you explain the career of catcher Jim Hegan? That can easily be answered with just one word: defense 

A 21-year-old Hegan found himself as the Cleveland Indians' backup catcher in 1942 and then, like so many of his fellow athletes, traded in his flannels for a government-issued uniform as he joined the global fight against Fascism. Upon returning in 1946, Jim became the Tribe's regular receiver, a position he then held for the next eleven seasons. In all that time, he never topped .249, never hit more than 14 home runs in a single season, never scored or drove in more than 61 runs. But he rarely committed errors or passed balls, and seven times he had a fielding percentage of .990 or better. (His career fielding percentage, in fact, was .990) He was masterful on balls in the dirt and artful on pop-ups; it was said that he didn't even have to watch the ball going up, he could tell by the sound of the bat hitting the ball just where it was going. He liked to work ­ in 1948 he missed just ten games, and the following season he missed just two! Don't forget, this was long before the DH, which means that Hegan caught 152 of Cleveland's 154 games. His fellow players recognized his abilities by selecting him to the American League All-Star team five times, but perhaps the most telling statistic can be found on the mound ­ six different Cleveland pitchers turned in a total of 18 twenty-win seasons while throwing to Jim Hegan. Certainly these were very talented hurlers ­ Bob Feller, Bob Lemon and Early Wynn all became Hall of Famers ­ but anyone who follows baseball knows how important a good catcher is to even the best pitcher. The battery (as the pitcher and catcher used to be called) are the team within the team, and control the pace of the game. Three times ­ in 1951, 1953 and 1956 ­ the Indians featured three twenty-game winners, and in 1954 the Tribe won 111 games, an all-time American League record for the 154-game schedule. Long-suffering Cleveland fans will also appreciate this: he was the regular catcher for two pennant winners, including the aforementioned 1948 team that won it all. And in a lineup that featured Lou Boudreau, Larry Doby (both of whom are in the Hall of Fame), Joe Gordon and Kenny Keltner, it was Hegan who paced the champions with five RBI in that Series, including a three-run homer in front of 86,000 fans in Game Five.  

Birdie Tebbetts, a career baseball man who played, managed and scouted for decades, once said "you start and end any discussion of catchers with Jim Hegan... (he) was the best I ever saw." Bob Feller has stated that Hegan "was the best defensive catcher I ever had... you couldn't throw a ball past him."

After retiring as an active player, Jim Hegan became a coach for the New York Yankees, and over the next dozen years he contributed to four pennant winners and two World Series champions, and mentored such youngsters as Thurman Munson, Rick Dempsey and Jake Gibbs. He later coached for the Tigers, but he also helped to oversee the abilities of his son Mike, who fashioned his own big-league career in the majors in the 1960s and 1970s.  

Jim was from that generation that wasn't looking for accolades, they simply did their jobs. He served for three years in the Coast Guard during World War II because that's what had to be done. He met a young lady named Clare while in high school, eventually married her, and they spent 43 years together, because that's the way life is supposed to be. He undoubtedly wanted to have more time to enjoy retirement but unfortunately he had a weak heart and suffered a heart attack in 1984, passing away at the relatively young age of 63. Probably because his forte was defense and there are few clips of him displaying his enormous talents, he is mostly forgotten by today's fans, even rabid ones like my co-worker. And that's just too bad ­ a life like this ought to be celebrated, and held up as a shining example. Jim Hegan was an All-Star in life, and that's a statistic you won't find in the Baseball Encyclopedia.